I’ve played the second day of Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox), and I have much to say about it. (The first day was the demo.) It has retained the “you’ve done all you can do” message from Flamey, which I appreciate. Of course, I can still wander around, pick things up, and turn things in to the, ah, archive thing to make money. I’ll explain that in a bit. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wrote about how much I was looking forward to this game and to The Incident at Galley House (William Rous, Evil Trout Inc.).
I did mention, though, that my emotions were mixed about Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit. I played the first part of it when Netflix was trying out its beta gaming desktop, and I played the demo of it when they broke free from the Netflix shackles and could put the game on Steam. The demo is the first day, much like what I played on Netflix.
Side note: I want to do my mini-rant about sequels. For games in this case, but just in general, too. Quick side note to the side note: series should go to about seven units. I’ve had a firm belief about this since I was in my twenties. I’ve seen too many writers feeling like they have to milk their main protagonist for all they’re worth. I don’t blame them, obviously, because you gotta get paid, but….
Let me give you an example. I used to read Sue Grafton’s alphabet series (starring Kinsey Millhone) voraciously. I really liked it when it first came out. However, M was the turning point as it was the last one I enjoyed. Part of the problem was that she set the books so that each one followed the last, timewise. Meaning there was only a few weeks between each book in the books whereas they came out every year or two? I think? That means that even when the actual years went into the internet era, Kinsey was still using a brick phone that did little more than just receive calls.
It got tiring after a while, and it really felt constraining. Plus, the problem is that when you have a really popular protagonist, you can’t mess with them too much. Every book, Kinsey had to say that she cut her own hair and that her landlord is an eighty-year old hottie. I know she had to set up each book in the same way, but it got really old by the time I hit N.
Back to Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit.
The second day took about an hour to finish. I appreciate that it doesn’t take a huge amount of time, but I did feel a bit overwhelmed by all the different quests I were given. I don’t know if I’m remembering this inorrectly, but I felt that quests went much more slowly in the first game, and I wasn’t given as many on the daily.
There was a pacing issue in the first game where the grind seemed too real, and things took too long to do. Again, I appreciated the real-time pacing. I liked being made to wait until the next in-real-life day to continue a quest. However, the economy was a bit too stingy in the beginning. It was too hard to get the things you needed in the first few weeks. I remember looking to the forums when I couldn’t get an ingredient I needed and found out that it was hard to get. I felt like I was barely scraping together enough money to buy what I needed.
By the middle of the game, I was positively rolling in it. I had no need to worry about money, and I could buy whatever I needed. I much prefer that to scraping by, but I wish there was more of a balance between the two. I know it’s a hard balance to get, though, so I’m not going to be too put out by it.
Also, in this game, there’s less of that friction. That’s a word (friction) I kept using in the last post, but I can’t help it. It’s something that games struggle so much with, and it tends to swing from one extreme to the other. FromSoft happened at a time when games were made to be as easy as possible so gamers didn’t ever have to feel like they were failing.
Miyazaki said, “Yeah, no.” Not consciously, maybe*, but he gave no quarters. And that started the era of games being brutal for the sake of being brutal.**
I think this game suffered from the same criticism–well, at least a similar one. Not that it was considered difficult, but you did have to have patience to play it. I know that I might be hanging too much importance on the fact that the changes happened after they got bought out by Netflix, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
By the way. Mad props to the two founders, David Edery and Daniel Cook, they took a cut in salary to buy back Spry Fox from Netflix and they increased the profit for their employees. I paid a higher price for the game than I could have because I wanted to give more to them (same with the other game I talked about yesterday, but I’m not talking about that game here because I have not played it yet).
I have a warm feeling playing this game. I’m eager to see where it’s going and if I’ll gel with any of the bears as much as I did with some of the NPCs in the last game. I’ll write more about it the further into the game I get. There have been a few QOL improvements, but there have also been some that I’m not as sanguine about. As to the latter, I’ll see if they change with a future patch.
*That’s an argument I’ve had several times–whether Miyazaki loved his players or hated them. I always maintained that he was indifferent to them. He just wanted to make the gorgeous, twisted worlds without any thought to the player.
**Which, by the way, misses the whole entire damn point. It’s the exploration and the grim fantasy that matter. Yes, there’s difficulty in From games, but that’s not the point.*** It feels almost incidental for most of the game. Like, yes it’s difficult and yes the worlds are intricate with no crossover.
***Well, mostly. Not going to get into that in this post because I’ve written about it ad nauseam in the past.